Forum: Health care is not God-given, inalienable right

Leonard Pitts’ April 1 column, “Hobby Lobby case a slippery slope,” claims that allowing employers to omit certain types of coverage in their health insurance plans for religious reasons would infringe on employees’ rights, as in “a woman’s contraceptive choices are none of her employer’s business.” Exactly.

But Mr. Pitts doesn’t advance his argument far enough. Specifically, why should it be an employer’s business to provide any health insurance at all to employees? Before ObamaCare, getting health insurance from one’s employer was always a perk, something offered by one’s employer to be competitive in the labor market. Making health care a so-called right is a fundamental flaw in the ObamaCare legislation. It’s certainly not a God-given, inalienable right.

ObamaCare can succeed only if enough people or employers can be coerced into making it work, and that’s not, in my opinion, what our founders had in mind when they wrote the Declaration of Independence.